This is the Internet presence for myself, Richard Geib. It has been in existence since October 9th, 1996 and is where I work out, in a semi-public forum, my thoughts and thinking. I say “semi public” because I write first and foremost here for myself. I would enjoy any reader to enjoy or appreciate what I do on this site, but its purpose is more for me to enter that quiet area where I can hear my most “inner voice” and try to make sense of it. I never quite know what I think until I have taken the time, trouble, and discipline to write my thoughts down.

Hence, I write primarily for myself, but I write in a public space. Simple enough?

Almost everyone I know, it seems, might view my Facebook page. But nobody, it seems, reads this webpage anymore. So I have a certain sense of freedom here. I like it. Hiding in plain sight.

Most of this site was created in the early days of the Internet when I was in my middle and late twenties. Frankly, it was also a creative way to cope with the trauma surrounding the death of my mother at that time, as well as trying to work out who I was as a younger man. Who was I? What was heroism? What thoughts did I think worth thinking? What did I know? I always held the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, and his spirit of introspection in “que sais-je?” (What do I know?)

During my thirties and forties I mostly worked, and my work on the Internet was in professional spaces; and my personal webpage mostly languished. I built my career, got married, and started a family (re. photos on this page). I was busy. My posting on my personal site were few and far between.

I returned to my personal site in its second iteration a more mature man. I had much less to say on “big issues.” At times I am almost embarrassed to read my words from decades in the past, and I wonder if time and experience have not made me a completely different person than the one who opined on this or that topic. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.” True enough! But I purposely leave my “essaies” (in the sense of Montaigne’s literary/philosophical “attempts” or “trials”) from then and now online, as I am the same man then as now. It is just that I have changed over the decades, and in some ways I am a better man, in others a worse.

I read some of what I have written and agree as much now as I did then. In other places I have completely changed my mind. Mostly I have become more circumspect and conflicted, saying “Yes, but…”

It would seem I have less to say about the larger world as I approach fifty years of age. Many fewer sweeping generalizations. But I always have some knot to work out in my thinking or impression to clarify in my life’s experience. Issues of war and peace and justice and injustice confound me. But I would try to make sense of anything I can.

This is the spirit of my webpage now. Tentative. Speculative. Seeking clarity out of confusion. More cautious. Less audacious.

Middle aged, like me. For better and for worse.

Maybe it is the natural interplay of change and continuity in any human life witnessed over time in one Internet domain — my webpage, which has many layers, putting much in plain sight if one is willing to dig.